Search - Articles

was solved a couple of days later when I watched a bird delicately pick bright red berries from an ornamental shrub down in Purley. I made a few notes: grey head, dark cheek patch, reddish brown wings, pale grey breast, brownish bib, white side flecks, pale

wing-tip to wing-tip is striped orange and white and quite pretty under a lens.It had been spreading across Europe from its first discovery in Macedonia in the middle of the 20th century and arrived in the UK in Wimbledon in 2002. I first noticed

everywhere. A few years ago I cleared out the small window boxes of the dead and dying plants that were clearly not doing very well. All I found, instead of roots, were lots of these small (7-8mm) creamy white maggots — vine weevil grubs.The adult weevils

.Sometimes regarded as a minor nuisance, they buzz lazily about the house when they awake from hibernation, but unlike blowflies and houseflies, they are not attracted to food and are not implicated in the spread of diseases. Gilbert White, in his Natural History

shoulders and abdomen broadly beige and with a white tail (just like the white-tailed bumble), and some are tawny orange all over (just like the carder bees). Merodon always looks dapper and well-groomed, and perhaps that's the easiest way to tell it from

-headed gull that you are most likely to see far inland. Indeed, many books make the point that it cannot really be called a ‘sea’ gull. These are the raucous white spots attentively following the tractor as it ploughs the dark lowland soil

I have cats. Every so often I have to live with the guilt that they kill the local wildlife. It's usually one of the mice breeding in the compost heaps or a blue-tit fledgling. The main hunter is the black and white one; lovely and soft and over

of knowing that the elegant black and white birds they were mobbing were worth the effort of attack. Evolution works slowly, so surely there could not have been any innate image of a potential egg predator in their minds. I wonder what behaviour

there, chattering loudly in the apple tree, was old black and white, cocking its head first one way, then the other.I was really chuffed. Not about having the bird in the garden, but about the boy correctly identifying it. I congratulated him on his

.All the books say that woodpigeons are only likely to be confused with rock doves (the common pigeon from which domesticated and racing pigeons have been bred) or the stock dove, but when I’ve been with non-birders the white neck marks have got people muddled